More ideas to mend Broken Britain

Wednesday 31 March 2010 11:26 BST

The Tory leader, David Cameron, has today given more substance to his pledge to mend "Broken Britain".

In a speech in east London, he outlined plans for a 5,000-strong army of trained community organisers who would engage directly with people in deprived areas, to help address the problems of poverty and social exclusion.

Appropriately, he invoked what he called this paper's "great campaign" on behalf of London's dispossessed. We welcome this effort to put the poor at the heart of the Tories' social agenda.

There are distinctively conservative elements to this ambitious policy, chiefly Mr Cameron's pledge that the organisers would be employed by local charities rather than by the public sector - though they would be trained by the state.

In addition, a new public bank, specifically designed to deliver funds to small local projects which at present have difficulty in obtaining loans, would be funded with money from dormant bank accounts.

The initiative does have successful precedents in the US: President Obama once engaged in a similar project in Chicago.

It is not a substitute for radical engagement with some of the root causes of deprivation, such as the poverty trap within the tax and benefits system that makes it hardly worthwhile for many poorer people to work. But it is a concrete attempt to tackle Broken Britain - and adds further flesh to the Tories' election offer.

Juries make justice

There has, at last, been a verdict in the case of the Heathrow Airport warehouse robbery. After six years, three failed trials and £25 million, three men have been found guilty, though little of their £1.4 million haul has been recovered.

But the important aspect of this latest trial is the fact that it was presided over by a judge without a jury, for fear that the police could not protect the jury from intimidation.

This is a lamentable failure for one of the fundamental principles of British justice. There have been other cases of judge-only trials, notably the Diplock system in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, but that was a necessary concession to the conflict.

Jury intimidation is a serious offence. For the police effectively to concede that they cannot safeguard a jury in a case like this is a disgrace - and one that they must not repeat.